Jayne Anne Phillips

Novelist and short-story writer from West Virginia. Her works have been translated into twelve different languages. She runs the creative writing program at Rutgers University, Newark. Jonathan Cape will publish her new novel, Lark and Termite, in spring 2009.

The first four years of the Bush administration were devastating, while the last four years have been tragic. We may define 'devastating' as 'overwhelming, distressing, demoralising', causing 'widespread damage, enormous shock and upset', while 'tragic' moves into different territory. 'Tragic' implies permanence, the lasting effects of heroic struggle and downfall, a story already told, in which an individual or society must live with the 'heartbreaking' or 'heartrending' effects of bad decisions, lack of foresight, corrupt influence, even acts of God. Heartrending, a compound word meaning, literally, 'to tear apart violently or be torn apart in this way', captures the image and the fact. Tragedy, in the dramatic sense, involves players on a stage who represent generations. The participants are lost, but tragedy can redeem itself by instructing the audience, instigating dialogue, inspiring change.

Americans have never specialised in dialogue, but the American people, in the past, have overcome religious bigotry and class divides to elect unlikely presidential candidates.

More recently, in the era soon to be labelled the Bush years, the Republicans, fuelled by vast financial resources and steel-jawed organisation that is perhaps second nature to captains of industry, appropriated the flag, 'family values' and 'homeland security' to further entrench themselves in power. Bush declared an open-ended 'war on terror' in the wake of 9/11 and anointed himself a wartime President. Challenged on all fronts, the Democrats chose candidates that, seemingly, could not win a general election.

There was 2000, when Gore ran a wooden, careful campaign until the very last weeks, won the popular vote, ceded the election to the rule of the Electoral College and then, in the attempt to convey the message of global warming to a audience that would listen, went on to win the Nobel Prize and an Academy Award.

Eight years later, the Bush administration admits global warming exists, and the Texan who helped fund the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry in 2004, T Boone Pickens, is backing wind turbines: a major new initiative that would harness the wind corridor that runs from west Texas to Canada. Others suggest the construction of vast solar power cells in the deserts of the American Southwest, clean power that could help win a second war for American independence (from foreign oil). In 2000 and 2004, vast numbers of Americans voted against their own economic interests over 'hot button' issues like abortion and gay marriage. Red and blue states seemed entrenched realities and the polarisation of the electorate seemed complete.But wait. The endless war has caught up with Bush. The Republican plan for the war has failed, despite the 'surge', and the powers behind the throne find themselves mired in a 'don't look now' quagmire: an oil/ failing economy/ war(s) on terror nightmare in which friend and foe alike are funded by drug money and the price of oil has immediate, disastrous effects on the economy. People juggling two low-wage jobs can't afford to get to work in the rural counties and sprawling exurbs, the population centres where public transportation is lacking and highways are meant for drivers and their cars. Unemployment is high and the banking industry isn't lending money.

Education budgets have been slashed and slashed again. Uncertainty runs rampant; all bets are off. Americans lack confidence (and health insurance) for a reason. We've seen how this government reacts to immense challenges. Bush's administration responded to 9/11 by fighting the wrong war and fighting it wrong.

Torture, always an ineffective means of gaining reliable information, became offshore, unofficial policy, a deadly karmic boomerang. Reservists and troops fighting the war saw their deployments extended and extended again. The flag-draped coffins of American soldiers are not photographed, but the images from New Orleans could not be stopped. Government could not respond quickly or successfully to Katrina, a natural disaster exacerbated by human error. Republicans can organise elections, but can we trust them to organise relief? Disaster relief? Economic relief? Long term relief from the oil imbroglio, and all the other 'confusing, messy, complicated situations that (may) involve disagreement and intrigue'? Can government, in short, provide leadership?

Not this government. The Bush years have ushered in a general, societal disbelief and disillusion in government, a return to the nadir of confidence associated with Nixon and the post-Watergate era. For the first time in decades, red and blue states, Republicans, Democrats, Independents agree: this isn't working. No one is winning and everyone is losing.

And now? Fasten your seatbelts: this bumpy ride promises plenty of heroic struggle. Hillary Clinton would have made a good President, but the baggage she could not put down proved too heavy. McCain rolled the dice and pleased conservative fundamentalists with his cynical, bizarre VP choice, Sarah Palin, whose practised portrayal of herself is a big hit on SNL, but a dark turn for America. The ah shucks family values hockey mom who made sure bars in Alaska are open until 5am is an unleashed, race-baiting attack dog who plays to old fears, white guilt and paranoia. World wide depression threatens, and one small town Southerner interviewed by the New York Times was quoted as saying he faulted Obama, not for being black, but for being multi-racial, when the Bible instructs against 'mixing one blood with another'. The unknown in this race, in which Obama won every debate, looks and is 'presidential' in his bearing, his tone, his arguments, is whether the race factor, and the rumour-mongering in which Republicans have desperately engaged, will result in the so-called 'Bradley Effect'. If the polls are misleadingly optimistic, and too many Americans vote their fears despite clear evidence that McCain is angry and embittered and will do anything, say anything, allow anything, to win, the election could be lost. America could lose, and the ripple effect of that loss would continue the downward spiral of a country once respected around the world.

I strongly support Barack Obama and make no secret of it here. He is eloquent, innovative, truly engaged. He writes his own books. Bicultural and biracial, he's been called upon to prove himself again and again in two cultures, within two racial communities. He generates intense excitement in widely diverse quadrants of the American electorate and throughout the world. His election would immediately change global perceptions of America, as has, to some degree, his candidacy. I don't agree that he 'wouldn't survive in Washington' as President. Would such an 'inexperienced' individual have succeeded against enormous odds to win nomination and run for President? Obama is a team player and an excellent judge of talent who has, in T Boone Pickens's words, 'run a hell of a race'. I have a feeling that Obama agrees with Pickens that offshore drilling does not comprise an energy plan, and that 'if you're importing 70 per cent of your oil, you have a security problem'.

To win, Obama must pull in enormous numbers of American voters too uninvolved to vote, and young voters who haven't participated in the past. Disenfranchised voters, some of whom must now produce driver's licences to cast their ballots, must be heard. Will they? And Americans struggling to get by, Americans who have not enjoyed privileges common to those in government, must vote their interests, not their prejudice. If Obama wins, inclusive, careful progress is possible. If McCain wins, he will win by default, for all the wrong reasons.

Patrick McGrath

Winner of the Premio Flaiano Prize in Italy for his 2000 novel Martha Peake. A number of his books have been adapted for the cinema including his 1990 novel Spider which was filmed by David Cronenberg. He lives in New York.

Two or three weeks ago, which seems an eternity in this fraught, interminable presidential campaign, Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that the McCain-Palin attack-dog approach to electioneering made Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. A McCain administration, he argued, would not be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. It would be much, much worse.

A sobering thought. To list in 800 words everything cynical, immoral, illegal, incompetent, dumb, deceitful, vicious and unconstitutional that's been said or done by the current administration would be impossible. It started with a stolen election. One Saturday late in the year 2000, a day many of us will not forget, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court aborted the Florida vote recount. The blow struck home with sickening impact: there was no place else to go. This was the final court of appeal.

We then watched with growing dismay as George Bush, a blustering, incurious, smirking man driven by a far-right political ideology and rabidly doctrinaire religious beliefs assumed the presidency. We listened to him as he mangled the English language. At first it was even amusing. But if he can't speak in sentences, so ran the deeper anxiety, can he think in sentences? Can he think at all? As we were to learn, you don't need to think if you can trust your gut. The politics of stupidity had begun.

Things were quiet for a while. Then came the attacks of 9/11. It took George Bush four weeks to get forces into Afghanistan. Clearly he had little interest in pursuing the man responsible. The Bushes had long enjoyed mutually advantageous relations with the bin Laden family and other wealthy Saudis. The administration began instead to hammer home the false linkage of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, so as to legitimise the war they really wanted to fight. By hook and by crook they got their war.

But how badly they mismanaged it. The disastrous decisions of the American proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, in May 2003 provoked an insurgency that was by no means inevitable. In the smoke and blood that followed – tens of thousands dead so far, almost five million displaced, the treasures of an ancient culture looted and destroyed – the Bush administration created a plunder economy of staggering corruption. From that economy the likes of Halliburton, Vice President Cheney's corporate alma mater, reaped vast profits.

Meanwhile the Bush people manipulated the terrorist threat so as to sustain domestic support for both the war and an unconstitutional expansion of presidential powers. Over the next years it emerged that they illegally wiretapped American citizens, turned the justice department into a wing of the executive branch, and flouted the Geneva Conventions. Torture of prisoners was approved at the highest levels of government. Rights of habeas corpus were arbitrarily suspended. When evidence of these and other instances of criminality began properly to emerge, popular outrage was exacerbated by intense frustration. The media and the congress had for far too long been silent, swept up in a jingoistic frenzy cynically orchestrated by the White House. They were desperate not to be seen as unpatriotic.

Anger alternated with disillusion. The country became unrecognisable to many of its own citizens, and a vertiginous sense of moral dislocation crept into the American soul. There was widespread incredulity that a US President should even have to deny that torture – by the military, by the CIA – was occurring on his watch. As the revelations piled up, so the revulsion, the outrage, the frustration and disbelief grew more acute. The mood was further exacerbated by the tragically inadequate federal response to Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans in the fall of 2005.

Over the last few months we have mellowed a little. The manifest lame duckery of George Bush's presidency has been a source of quiet satisfaction to many. With tentative hope, and no little trepidation, we've watched a Democratic candidate emerge who possesses the temperament, the intellect, the wisdom and gravitas to begin the work of undoing the wreckage and horror of this long nightmare. In giddy private moments we anticipate the prospect of the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

But we learn now that George Bush hasn't finished with us quite yet. The neoconservative economic policies he so vigorously championed have produced widespread collapse in the financial markets. The recession just now getting underway will create enormous global hardship for years to come. We can only pray it's the last malodorous exhalation of this disgraced and unloved President as he skulks out the door. We believe our man can fix his mess, but small wonder we're jumpy. The alternative, McCain-Palin, is unthinkable. More of the Bush nightmare, or some still worse variant of it – again?